piece with no name
Hypothesis:
What to call a piece about meaning and translation? Perhaps it should bear no name? Elusive yet static, in motion yet definite, meaning escapes, meaning remains.
This book with no name is an attempt to re-present what rests of meaning when translation occurs: the sound of flapping thoughts.
Thesis:
Sem Saida is not a printed poem, its colored words move around a black background in a seemingly random pattern, with monitor light as its support. An active drawing, it can be stared at endlessly, sometimes allowing meaning, others pure ecstatic pleasure. Does the relationship between these words and colors have a hidden meaning? Has Augusto De Campos chosen these colors for a particular reason, and is there a precise tension in the boundaries between them, as with any membrane?
Put to translate a language I only understand in its most basic, in an extremely rudimentary manner, in its closeness to my mother tongue, how to keep alive the sense of estrangement?
Steps to follow:
-collect all attempts at it and bind them together in a notebook.
-collect and bind along all side thoughts about translation that occur while at this task.
Conclusions:
1- Language is everyone’s medium.
2- Translation is everywhere, all the time.
3- Translation is both an opaque and transparent operation.
4- Meaning does not come in direct ways, only by approximation.
5- Still—not surprisingly— no name for this experiment.
Note: As with hieroglyphs, these notes will only reveal themselves partially, and in an indeterminate way. Elements from the surrounding environment will get on your way, please allow them to disturb you.